This article is from Knower substack, which shares a lot of alphas and insights. If you like the post, please give him a visit and spread the word.

Why, oh why won’t the coins just go up in a parabolic fashion and send all our net worths to Valhalla? The crypto market has seen a lot of choppiness / crabbish behavior as of late. 5% up, another 5% down, 10% down, another 3% up, ad infinitum.

This isn’t healthy.

And no, I’m not saying this isn’t healthy for a market. These type of movements aren’t healthy for us. We spend so much time in this brutal digital casino, whether it be watching the charts for 12 hours on a 15x leveraged position or joining 30 new discords a week.

Is this a generalization? Maybe. But judging from my timeline, most of my mutuals are constantly involved in everything and anything Crypto - which is totally fine. As for me, I’m currently juggling university, social relationships and managing a portfolio. I can’t always be on Twitter and checking charts, so I mostly do swing trades on higher time frames or buy and holds. This is fine, but I still spend a significant amount of time in this crude version of the metaverse.

But how many of us are totally immersed and tied to our bags?

There are a ton of emotions that come with trading these markets. The euphoric highs, the catastrophic lows and the despair that comes with chop. The latter will destroy you if you actively try to trade it. I’m not saying it’s an impossible task, but you have to be a very good trader to navigate the waters when they get this murky.

On red days like today, it’s easy to feel down. We’ve all felt like an idiot at some point, having let our emotions get the best of us leading to a horrifically bad trade. Red days exasperate these feelings, making you feel tilted or depressed. When combined with choppy market conditions, this can turn very bad, very fast.

Your timeline may have deceived you into thinking you need to make it. Like, make it right now or you’re screwed. Relax. You have time.

Just because influencer X on your feed is calling for a golden bull run in the next two weeks doesn’t mean you need to lever up your entire net worth to make it. In my opinion, crypto is still very much in an infancy period. Does this mean that everything will go 10000x from here? Probably not.

But do you really need a 10000x to feel good?

It’s common in Crypto to see your net worth swing a ridiculous amount everyday, which can lead you to become very detached from reality. After enough lucky (or good) trades, you might see yourself as some kind of genie - the one who has beat the market. Congrats.

However, it isn’t this easy. Just as quickly as it can go to the moon, your net worth can come back to Earth in a matter of hours. This most likely has the same psychological effect on you, only much worse. Seeing yourself lose these gains can be devastating.

“I’m such an idiot, why didn’t I sell Solana when I was up 500%? I should have seen this coming.”

“If I’d have just listened and taken profit, I’d have X amount of dollars right now.”

I believe the only way to navigate these markets in a healthy way is to seriously evaluate what type of person you are and how that can translate to success in the market.

But how can we possibly recover from the permanent psychological damage we’re putting ourselves through?

This is a difficult question, because all of us lead very different lives. Crypto Twitter has people of all ages, backgrounds and net worths - this is what makes it so special. Some of us got in early, some of us got in late, you know how it works. Some of us may not even know why it is that we’re here in the first place. If you’re like me, you stumbled on CT through dumb luck (or fate).

No matter your age, you should realize that money won’t make you a better person. Sure, you might be able to do some pretty cool stuff and achieve some very awesome short term happiness. But is money what will make you fulfilled? Will opening that next leveraged position really help you in any tangible way? I find it hard to believe that all of us will make it.

As someone who’s relatively young, I think it’s important to achieve balance in life, and I’m afraid a lot of my timeline is neglecting this. Sure, it’s fun talking with mutual anons, but at what point will you look at yourself in the mirror and realize this is all just a big game? Crypto’s current market conditions feel and play out like a game. So much of CT has made absurd wealth, trapping them into a mindset that these numbers aren’t real - just something on a screen.

But these numbers are real, and they affect millions of people. So many people base their entire wellbeing around these numbers, feeling good when their portfolio is green and depressed when this green turns to red. Maybe focus on something like building a useful Crypto product, or joining a team dedicated to mastery of all things Crypto. Or you could always just step away from this if you’re feeling the market’s effects a little too much.

It’ll still be there when you come back - with a big grin on its face and a nice free drink to make you cheerful again.

Crypto will only go up, it’s inevitable. But what are you willing to sacrifice to see the numbers go up, and will you truly feel “good” at that point?

This article is from Knower substack, which shares a lot of alphas and insights. If you like the post, please give him a visit and spread the word.